The Seven Sacred Truths
~Honour One Another~
The Second Chakra
External Power
Level Two
The Power of Relationships
Sacred Truth of the Second Chakra
The Sacred Truth inherent in the second chakra is ~Honour One Another~. This truth applies to our interactions with each other and with all forms of life. from a spiritual perspective every relationship we develop, from the most casual to the most intimate, serves the purpose of helping us to become more conscious. Some relationships are necessarily painful because learning about ourselves and facing our own limitations are not things we tend to do with enthusiasm. We often need to be spiritually ~set up~ for such encounters.
The physical energies of the second Chakra symbolise that all relationships are essentially spiritual messengers. They bring into our lives, and we into theirs, revelations about our own strengths and weaknesses. From relationships within the home to those at work to community or apolitical activity, no union is without spiritual value; each helps us to grow as individuals. We can more easily see the symbolic value of our relationship when we release our compulsion to judge what and who has value and instead focus on honouring the person and the task with which we are involved.
The second chakra’s energy has an inherent duality. The unified energy of the first chakra, represented by the tribal mind, becomes divided into polairites in the second chakra. This division of forces has been given many names; yin/yang, anima/animus, male/female. Sun/moon. Understanding the significance of these opposites is the key to working with second chakra issues. These dual energies ensure that we ~attract~ to ourselves relationships that help us come to know ourselves. Well known expressions such as ~Like attracts Like~ and ~when the student is ready the teacher will appear~ acknowledge that an energy ~working behind the scenes~ seems to organise when and where we meet people - and always at the right time.
The spiritual challenge of the second chakra is to learn to interact consciously with others to form unions with people who support our developments and to release relationships that handicap our growth.
Location
Lower abdomen to navel area
Energy connection to the emotional mental body:
This chakra resonates to our need for relationships with other people and our need to control to some extent the dynamics of our physical environment. All the attachments by which we maintain control over our external lives, such as authority, other people, or money, are linked through this chakra to our energy field and physical body.
Symbolic/perceptual Connection
The energy in this chakra enables us to generate a sense of personal identity and protective psychological boundaries. As we continually assess our personal strength in regard to the external world and its physically seductive forces - such as sex, money, additive substances, or other people - the second chakra energy of a healthy physical ego keeps us able to interact with that world without having to negotiate or ~sell~ ourselves, it is the energy of self sufficiency, a survival instinct for being in the world.
Primary Strengths
The ability and stamina to survive financially and physically on ones own and to defend and protect oneself; the ~fight or flight~ instinct; the ability to take risks, the resilience to recover from loss whether of family members, partners, property, occupation or finances; the power to rebel and re-establish a life; and personal and professional decision-making ability and talent.
Primary Fears
Fears of loss of control, or being controlled by another; through the dominating power of events or conditions such as addiction, rape, betrayal, impotence, financial loss, abandonment by our primary partner or professional colleagues. Also, fear of the loss of the power of the physical body.
The Power of Choice
The energy of the second chakra helps us evolve beyond the collective energy of the tribe. Choice is born out of opposites, and the duality of the second chakra is forever challenging us to make choices in a world of opposing sides, of positive and negative energy patterns. Every choice we make contributes a subtle current of our energy to our Universe, which is responsive to the influence of human consciousness.
Managing the power of choice, with all its creative and spiritual implications, is ~the essence of the human experience~. All spiritual teachings are directed toward inspiring us to recognise that the power to make choices is the dynamic that converts our spirits into matter, our words into flesh. Choice is the process of creation itself.
The fact that our choices weave our spirits into events is the reason the major spiritual lessons are formed around one essential lesson: Make your choices wisely because each choice you make is a creative act of spiritual power for which you are held responsible. Further, any choice made from faith has the full power of ~heaven~ behind it - which is why "faith the size of a mustard seed can move a mountain". And any choice made from fear is a violation of the energy of faith.
Choice has a mysterious aspect, however for we will never completely know the full outcome of any choice we make. A primal lesson of the second chakra is the paradoxical nature of choice ; what seems right can turn out wrong; what appears good can end up bad. Just when everything is going smoothly, chaos breaks things up..
Paradoxically, while the energy of the second chakra inclines us to try to control our lives, the lesson of the second chakra is that we cannot be in control. We are physical beings and energy beings, but since the physical world cannot be controlled, the task before us is to master our inner responses to the external world, our thoughts and emotions.
Nevertheless, we all struggle in a seemingly never ending cycle of disappointments in which we attempt to control our lives. We search endlessly for the one grand choice that will put everything in our lives into permanent order, halting the motion of change long enough to establish final control over everyone and everything. Is that choice the right career? The right marriage partner? The right geographic location? In seeking this right choice constantly, we give form to our fear of the changing rhythm that is life itself. In looking for this single person or thing that will forever bring us peace, stability, love and health, we dismiss the more authentic power that lies ~behind our eyes and not in front of them~. The truth contained within the paradoxical nature of dualism is this; It is not ~what~ we choose that matters; our power to influence an outcome lies in our ~reasons~ for making a certain choice.
The challenge of the second chakra is to learn what motivates us to make the choices we do. In learning about our motivations, we learn about the content of our spirits. Are you filled with fear, or are you filled with faith? Every choice we make contains the energy of either faith or fear, and the outcome of every decision reflects to some extent that faith or fear. This dynamic of choice guarantees that we cannot run away from ourselves or our decisions.
Choice and Relationships
Second chakra energy is extremely volatile because it seeks to create. It is also linked to the issues of physical survival, sex; power and money, the currencies of relationships. As we set out to carve a place for ourselves in the physical world, our internal conflict between faith and fear is often buried under the survival issues that dominate our thoughts. Can I earn a living? Can I find a partner? Can I take care of myself?
The shadow side of second chakra issues consists of our most prevalent fears, rape, betrayal, financial loss and poverty, abandonment, isolation, impotence, and the inability to care for ourselves. Each of these fears has the power to control us and to direct our actions for an entire lifetime. In the language of the scriptures, these fears qualify as ~false gods~.
In order to learn about our motivation - to discover our personal ~false gods~ we need relationships. To form a relationship we use some of our energy or personal power. Once the relationship is formed, we may ask, often unconsciously: Is this relationship drawing power from me, or am I drawing power from it? where do I end, and where does the other person begin? What is my power, and what is the other’s power? Am I compromising myself, in exchange for safety, money or status. While these questions are essentially healthy, in most relationships we being thinking in terms of psychologically divisive and conflict inducing opposites; me or you, mine or yours, good or bad, winner or loser, right or wrong, rich or poor.
Symbolically these conflicts represent most people’s relationship to ~God~; my power or Yours - are You really with me on this earth or must I try to control everything myself? And if a Divine Power is maneuvering behind the scenes, how do I know what choices to make? This primary conflict of faith is present in every one of our relationships.
Paradoxically, our challenge in managing these conflicting energies is to maintain them in the consciousness of the inherent oneness of the Universe. We being this journey by exploring conflict within relationships. Relationships generate conflict, conflict generates choice, choice generates movement, and movement generates more conflict. We break free of this cycle by making choices that transcend dualism and the perceived divisions between ourselves and others, and between ourselves and ~God~. So long as we focus on trying to control another person and forget that person is a mirror reflecting back to us our own qualities, we keep conflict alive within ourselves. Seeing ourselves and others in symbolic unions, however, helps us accommodate differences.
The Challenge of Managing Creative Energy
Second chakra energies need to create life , to ~move the earth~, to make an impression or contribution to the continuum of life. Creative energy, unlike inspiration - a seventh chakra quality - is essentially physical, of the earth or grounded. It is the sensation of being physically alive. Second chakra energy gives us our basic survival instincts and intuitions, as well as our desire to create music, art, poetry and architecture, and the curiosity to investigate nature in science and medicine. Our creative energy draws us into an internal dialogue with the polarities of the self, our conflicting inclinations, and it compels us to form external relationships to resolve these polarities.
Creative energy breaks us out of habitual patterns of behaviour, thoughts and relationships. Habit is a hell to which people cling in an attempt to stop the flow of change. But creative energy defies the repetition of habit. These two forces, repetition and creativity, are at odds with each other within the human psyche and impel us to invest and reshape the chaos of our world with personal meaning.
Second energy chakra energy is one of the primary resources we have for coping with the day to day events of our lives, providing creative solutions to mental, physical, and spiritual problems or issues. Blocking this energy can give rise to various physical conditions including depression. It also interferes with our spiritual maturation, as if stating, "I don’t wish to see anymore, I don’t wish to understand any deeper, I don’t wish to interact with the learning process of life". If allowed to flow, creative energy will continually act to reshape our lives and reveal more meaning for why things happen as they do than we could determine on our own.
Because creative energy is so volatile, however and so powerful, one of our greatest challenges is to use it consciously. We most frequently utilise our creativity in the privacy of our thoughts, but creative energies are also present in our interactions with other people We may, for example, creatively change the details of stories we tell others to suit our own purposes, or we may manipulate someone to get something we want. These are acts that use energy in negative ways. Gossip and manipulation drain power from the second chakra.
Negative acts and negative thoughts originate in fear. To the extent that the fear of betrayal by another person, for instance, or of violation within a relationship, or of being taken advantage of financially has authority within us, it determines the extent to which we will behave in negative ways. Faith in anything, be it positive or negative, produces results. Putting faith in fear generates destructive results beginning with the disintegration of our ability to relate confidently to the external world.
When we are motivated by fear, we can easily be seduced by the false gods of sex, power, and money and all they represent. Once seduced, we abdicate our control to the seductive authority; the dysfunctional personal relationship, the external source of money or security, the experience remembered long after it should have been put to rest, or the addiction to drugs or alcohol. Hypnotised by the voice of fear, one is unable to think or act with clarity, because one is contaminated with fears that short circuit creative energy and ideas, which gather their energy from the second chakra. Fear will often abort a new idea. Some people are afraid to give ideas - or relationships- the breathing room they need in order to thrive. You might feel threatened, for instance, when an idea you have reaches a point where you need expertise other than your own for support. Or you may assume a position of ownership over an idea and therefore you control everything and everyone attached to it. Both responses result in ~energy suffocation~, the smothering effect of a controlling, fearful parent or partner.
Inherent in the second chakra’s potential to create is also the potential for conflict. The sacred truth and theme of the second chakra ~Honour One Another~ contain enormous spiritual power and the solution to the management of this spiritual challenge. When we are in alignment with this truth, we bring out the best in ourselves and in others.
The Challenge of Managing Sexual Energy
Sexuality and all of our attitudes toward it are patterned in the second chakra. Sexuality is raw power, the power to form strong bonds and an intimate union with another person with whom we can produce and sustain life. Having a mate and forming a family, with or without children, represent stability for us as adults. The second chakra contains the desire, as well as the ability to create life.
Beside creating life, sex is an avenue of self expression, a means of making a statement about our comfort in relating physically to the world around us. Sexuality connects us to our own bodies and physical needs as well as to our potential for exploring erotic and sensual aspects. Sexual eroticism is a form of physical and emotional liberation as well as spiritual liberation. Erotic pleasure, is by nature, "in the moment", an encounter in which we drop most of our physical boundaries in order to enjoy the full measure of human contact. Explored without shame, erotic energy can elevate the human body and spirit into sensations of ecstasy, at times producing altered states of consciousness.
Sexual eroticism normally produces orgasm, and the release of this voltage of energy is essential to physical, mental and psychological health. Orgasm is one way - certainly one of the more pleasurable ways - of releasing the ~energy debris~ we collect through normal human contact. Exercise and creativity are other well known avenues of release. When a person has no release however, this energy backs up in the system and, without conscious management, can produce reactions, that run the gamut from depression to violence.
Sexual union, for all its physical pleasures, also symbolises a spiritual union of two people. it may well be that sexual energy opens a current of spiritual energy that forms a transcendent bond between two people who are deeply in love.
The need to strive to ~Honour One Another~ is easily and frequently eclipsed in sexual encounters, largely because sexual energy is so often controlled by fear or unrestrained desires. Men are made afraid of not being potent or masculine enough, yet most tribes permit their boys to act out of control sexually until they reach a certain ~maturity~. At that point, their capacity to act sexually responsibly is expected to kick in automatically. Women however, are still not given the same license to explore their sexual natures despite the women`s liberation movement. They are still required to behave, to control their sexual energy, while men still enjoy license. Many women are made to fear losing control or even being thought of as sexual beings.
The dualism of second chakra energies carries through the societal view of sexual energy as out of control on the one hand, and the high value our tribe places on self control, on the other. We view our sexuality as a continual threat to our ability to manage ourselves or control others. Relationships of any kind bring out our need to protect ourselves, but sexual bonds bring out extreme fears, especially of betrayal, a fear so strong that it can threaten an intimate relationship.
The Energy of Money
Money, like energy, is a neutral substance that takes its direction from the intention of the individual. A more fascinating aspect of money, however, is the fact that it can weave itself into the human psyche as a substitute for the life force. When people equate money with their life energy - an often unconscious substitution - the consequences are usually negative, for every piece of currency a person spends is also an unconscious expenditure of energy. A scarcity of money translates into a scarcity of energy in the body itself - again unconsciously.
To some degree we all unite money and the life-force within our psyches. Our challenge is to achieve, if we can, a relationship with money which is separate form our life force, yet attracted to our energy easily and naturally. The more impersonal our relationship to money is, the more likely we are to command its energy into our lives as we need it.
There is no denying that money does have clout in the symbolic or energy world. Expressions such as "Put your money where you mouth is" and "talk is cheap, money speaks" refer to the cultural view that what people do with their money says more about their motives than any spoken intention.
Money is the means through we make our private beliefs and goals public. Energy precedes action, and the quality of out intentions contributes substantially to the results.
Beliefs about money affect spiritual attitudes and practices as well. The belief that ~God~ blesses those who strive to do good by giving them financial rewards is extremely prevalent, as is the belief that we ourselves will be protected from poverty. These and many other beliefs of the same genre reflect the grander notion that ~God communicates with us through our finances, and, conversely, that we communicate with God by our financial actions.
Whether these attitudes are based on mythology or truth is irrelevant. We believe these social adages far more than we disbelieve them, and from that fact alone, we should understand that we have linked money and faith, the wisest relationship we can have with money is to see it as a substance that faith can attract into our lives.
Putting faith before money reduces money from its status as leader to that of servant, its more appropriate position. Faith that transcends money frees a person to follow his or her initiative guidance without giving over unnecessary authority to financial concerns. Obviously, so long as we are a part of the physical world, we must honor its code of debt and payment and assume a commonsense relationship to money, but money deserves no more of our attention than that.
The energies of the second chakra subtly bring up memories that need to be released, constantly presently us with the desire to act to become more whole in body and spirit.
Ethical Energy
The second chakra is the ethical center of the body. While laws are connected to the first chakra, personal ethics and morals reside in the second chakra. These energies spiritually influence us to have a strong code of ethics, drawing us into one on one relationships and alerting us intuitively to the dangers of betraying our moral code. It records all our interactions in which we ~give our word~ to other people, make promises and commitments to them, or accept their promises. A strong personal code of ethics radiates a perceptible quality of energy. It also records the promises we make to ourselves, such as New Years resolutions and other decisions to ~repattern~ certain behaviours in our lives.
The physical order of which the first chakra is in charge makes us feel safe, and its laws make us feel that control exists within our environment. The ethics and morals of the second chakra provide us with a language through which we can communicate what we accept and don’t accept in human relationships. Ethics hold enormous bonding power; we seek out the company of those who hold the same sense of right and wrong as we do; when people deviate from their ethical or moral behaviour, we often disqualify them as intimate companions. We also want our ~God~ to be an orderly god, and we are forever trying to crack through the Divine code of right and wrong and reward and punishment, attempting to reason why ~bad things happen to good people~. We take comfort in believing that if human justice fails us, Divine justice will see that all receive their ~just desserts~.
Because the second chakra harbours all our individual survival fears, we have constructed an external legal system that supports some semblance of fair play, which is crucial to our well being. Exercising legal power, or even using legal vocabulary, provides a release valve of sorts, for pressures that build up in the second chakra. The legal system, at least in theory, is a means of determining guilt and punishing violations; frequently an ~innocent~ verdict is seen as a matter of honour, and the financial settlements that the victim gains represents the return of some personal dignity. This dynamic is the social version of the sacred truth ~Honour One Another~.
The need for fair play and law and order is felt in our biology where we observe physical laws of health, such as exercise, proper nutrition, the conscious regulation of stress, and a measure of consistency and order. These laws signal our physiology that we are physically safe and trust our environment. Instability, by contrast, keeps our adrenalin going full strength and our ~fight or flight~ mechanism on continual alert. The physical body cannot ensure prolonged stress without producing negative biological response. Ulcers and migraines are two of the more common indicators that the chaos in a persons life has become unbearable.
Because humans are, by nature, a species that seeks law and order, we fall easily under the sway of people who project authority and seek to control. Our instinct to trust people with whom we live and work is an extension of the energy of ~Honour One Another~; it is unnatural to feel you have to look over your shoulder while trying to create something with others. Yet many people mis-use power to control rather than support others.
Within personal relationships it is normal to create a set of rules that both parties agree to follow: no extramarital affairs, no gambling, no major purchases without mutual agreement and so on. Setting rules in order to control another persons emotional, mental, psychological, or spiritual growth, however, is energetically destructive. In general, if a couple cannot expand their original rules and boundaries to accommodate personal growth, the relationship disintegrates. Parents sometimes ~violate~ their children spiritually and emotionally through imposing harsh rules as a way to establish parental authority.
Personal vengeance is yet another misuse of second chakra energy. This second chakra is our centre of self defence and of weaponry. Although newspapers are filled with reports of people delivering justice with bullets, most often acts of ~taking the law into one’s own hands~ are based on personal, psychological and emotional laws of honor, like the desire to get even with someone who has injured us in some way. The energy of vengeance is one of the most toxic emotional poisons to our system.
The Personal Power of the Second Chakra
While creativity, sexuality, morality and money are all forms of second chakra energy or power, the desire for personal power also needs to be discussed. Power is a manifestation of the life force. We require power in order to live, to thrive, to function. Illness, for example, is the natural companion of powerless people. Everything about our lives is, in fact, involved in our relationship to this energy called power.
At the level of the first chakra, we feel a sensation of power when we are with a group of people to whom we re bonded in some way, like an electrical current. The enthusiasm of sports fans or of participants in political rallies - uniting people behind the same team or cause, exemplifies this type of power. The quality of power in the second chakra, however, expresses this energy in physical forms, like materialism, authority, control, ownership, sexual magnetism, sensuality, eroticism and addiction. Every physically seductive form that power can take is energetically connected to the second chakra. And unlike the group nature of first chakra power, the second chakra has a one on one nature. Each of us as an individual needs to explore our relationship to physical power. We need to learn how and when we are controlled by external power, and, if so, the type of power to which we are most vulnerable.
Power is the life force, and we are born knowing this fact. From the time we are young, we test ourselves and our capacity to learn what and who has power, to attract power, and to use power. Through these childhood exercises we discover whether we have what it takes to draw power to ourselves. If we do, we begin to dream of what we would like to accomplish as adults. If we decide that we are unable to attract life force, however, we begin living in a type of ~power debt~. We imagine ourselves surviving only through the energies of other people, but not on our own.
For people who are confident of their ability to attract power, ordinary dreams can turn into power fantasies. Then the reasoning mind become eclipsed by a desire for power that stretches the parameters of acceptable behaviour to include any and all means that fulfill this end. The appetite for power can become an addiction that challenges the will of God. The craving for power for power’s sake along is the subject of numerous scriptures and myths of humans who are ultimately humbled by Divine design.
For all of us the challenge is not to become ~power celibate~ but to achieve sufficient internal strength to interact comfortably with physical power without negotiating away our spirits. This is what is means to be ~in the world but not of it~. We are fascinated by people who are immune to the seductions of the physical world; they become our social and spiritual heroes. Although internal power is certainly recognised as the ideal, in practice it is less popular than external power, first because external power is so much more practical, and second because internal power in some ways requires giving up our relationship to the physical world.
Physical science recognises second chakra energy as the law of cause and effect. (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction} and the law of magnetism {oppositely charged objects attract}. Applied to relationships, these laws mean that we generate patterns of energy that attract people who are opposite us in some way, who have something to teach. Nothing is random; prior to every relationship we have ever formed, we opened the door with energy that we were generating. This fact is what makes learning about second chakra dualism so interesting as the more conscious we become, the more consciously we can utilise the energy of the second chakra.
The core issue in uniting the dualistic energies of our relationships is to learn how to Honour One another. Using the energy of the second chakra we can learn to cherish the sacred unions we form with each other through the days of our lives.
So much of the way we respond to the external challenges is determined by how we respond to ourselves.
In addition to all the relationships we have with people, we must also form a healthy and loving relationship with ourselves - a task that belongs to the energy of the Third chakra, and the Sacred Truth
~Honour One-Self~
The Third Chakra
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The writings on the chakra pages have been taken from ~Anatomy of the Spirit – The Seven Stages of Power and Healing~ by Caroline Myss, PH.D. ( published by Three Rivers Press. ISBN 0-609-80014-0 ) and are reproduced with kind permission. There are far more details in that book and I would urge readers (if you find these pages helpful) to purchase the book by visiting Caroline’s web site ( click the link on her name) where there is also much more information to be gained {smile}